(FORTUNE Magazine) – If you've ever heard "Happy Birthday" sung by a group of Taiwanese waiters, or eaten at McDonald's in Brasilia, or watched a basketball game in Italy, you can begin to understand Carenage Bay. You think you know what's coming, but you're wrong. Strange, subtle differences suggest you've crossed into a parallel universe. Laboring furiously to be broad-minded, you tell yourself this new experience is...different...unique...enriching. Right. It's just not as good as the real thing.

On the minuscule Caribbean island of Canouan, next to Mustique (the celebrity enclave it aspires to emulate), Carenage Bay appears to be a top-end luxury resort. The setting is breathtaking: a broad, curving hillside falling steeply to a narrow beach and the sparkling sea. Yet as soon as I'm driven across the ridge from the island's leeward side, I sense the bizarre mixture of right and wrong that dogs the whole place.

Its ambition is huge: 178 rooms and suites clustered in villas over 800 acres, plus several restaurants, two pristine beaches, and a golf course. With so much to drink in, it's irritating to realize that the architecture of all those guest villas just isn't right--too square and blocky, the cupola-skylight thingies looking malproportioned and ungraceful. Well, maybe it's just me. Let's get inside one of the suites.

Mine is lovely, spacious, pleasingly rustic, appointed with the best of just about everything--heavy wooden blinds, hand-painted sinks, an espresso machine. Now we're getting somewhere. And yet the room looks barren because there's no art on the walls. The lighting, always more important than we realize until it's wrong, is lugubrious.

So much for aesthetics. There's no hot water! The bathroom is a veritable temple of comfort but--no hot water! In the community of world-class luxury resorts, this is a felony. When I call to ask what the problem is, I'm told water at Carenage Bay is heated by solar-powered rooftop units, and it has been cloudy lately. A truly pathetic excuse, but there's no point yelling at the staff. They didn't design the infrastructure. And by the way, after three sunny days the water still isn't hot.

Okay, shake off the irritation, and let's get some grub. Carenage Bay is owned and run by Italians, so dining expectations run high. For the most part, they're met. Consider a bowl of chick pea and prawn soup: The chick peas still hold some resistance, and the prawns are meltingly tender. Somebody back there cares about food. In keeping with the wrong-note theme, they could certainly care more. Ultimately you eat better than you're used to doing in the Caribbean, but not nearly as well as you would at, say, any Ritz-Carlton.

Of course, frivolities like food and shelter matter little to the golfer. Carenage Bay's beautiful course is--you're expecting this by now--strange in the extreme. Its 18 holes are built on ten or 11 holes' worth of acreage, about half on the narrow flatlands by the bay, the rest climbing the steep hills. You have to make up new golf etiquette as you go along, since often you're driving directly over the heads of golfers on a different hole's tee; several greens and fairways serve for two holes each.

The mostly tiny greens are hell to hit, but the upside is you can tell people you played a whole round without three-putting. Remember that, because it's probably the only good news you'll bring off the course. Most fairways are punishingly narrow, and if you go OB you won't find the ball without a machete. Connoisseurs of Lesser Antillean golf will realize this course isn't as dramatic as the Four Seasons' mountain layout on Nevis, but it's clever, fun, and a legitimate, if weird, test of golf.

Besides golfing, what I want to do on Canouan is scuba-dive. The dive shop here, unlike some in the Caribbean, actually wants to see my certification card before renting me a tank of air, which is reassuring. The dive is a pleasure--lots of big spiny lobsters, an orange-and-black eel, and endless varieties of spider crabs, some with little blue claws that glow.

I've never understood why resorts in tropical paradises want to make you think you're elsewhere, but they often do. The attempt here takes the form of the surreal Big Point Casino. It's a mile or so from the rest of the resort, so you get there in the golf cart every guest is issued at check-in. Promo literature promises a spectacular view, and I bet it is, but it's hard to tell because the casino doesn't open until after dark. The building is grand: Cream-colored stucco, soaring columns, quoins at the corners, with a broad porte-cochere; it feels a bit odd alighting from a golf cart.

At Carenage Bay, as in life, the simplest pleasures are best. The happiest experience of the trip is lunch at the beachside bar (insalata Caprese, then a club sandwich and fabulous French fries: potatoes, sweet potatoes, whole basil leaves, and garlic cloves deep-fried together). The friendly manager inquires of my political views. Sitting there in my swimming suit, with that lunch, gazing at a gleaming turquoise ocean in a gentle breeze, Sinatra singing Nelson Riddle arrangements in the background, I think, What more, really, could one want? And why can't they keep everything this basic? As I approach the Beach Club for dinner that night, a small electronic keyboard with automatic drum is cranking out "Yellow Bird." Have mercy! But then dinner is sea bream, brushed with olive oil and grilled exactly right, nice white wine, fruit for dessert--simple perfection. Just stop the damn music.

Rosewood Hotels & Resorts recently announced that it will take over management of Carenage Bay. Thank goodness. These folks know how to run a property; think of Little Dix Bay, Caneel Bay, and Dallas' Mansion on Turtle Creek. But I don't know any of this as I climb into the four-seat airplane to begin the trip home. I'm thinking fondly of the sea, still puzzling over the casino, and really, really looking forward to a hot shower.

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